Book Review

American Jewish history will benefit from this challenging work by Michael Alexander, which offers a series of clearly stated interconnecting theses. Alexander believes that most East European Jews moved into the middle class during the decade of the 1920s. He does not believe that they suffered much from discrimination or anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, he argues that Jews remained uncomfortable with their improved status and thus identified with those who were "outsiders" and who were scorned by other Americans. Alexander also believes that Jews were the only immigrant group so persistently to identify with the underdog and that their refusal to acknowledge or to accept their improved status indicated that a sense of marginalization had become part of Jewish identity.

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Alexander employs three case studies to support his thesis. The first concerns Arnold Rothstein who, more than any other individual, helped make gambling a Jewish "industry" by the 1920s. Most Americans hated or scorned Rothstein; he had been unfairly blamed for fixing the 1919 World Series, and he became the model for Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), a figure who bore little resemblance to the actual Rothstein. Why then did the Eastern European Jewish community embrace Rothstein and even eulogize him when gangsters gunned him down in 1928? Because, according to Alexander, many Jews persisted in believing that legitimate roads of advancement remained closed to them and that they had no choice but to embrace marginal and illegal endeavors.

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